For one thing, sires, safely dare I say, That friends the one the other must obey, If they will longe holde company. Love will not be constrained by mastery. When mastery comes, the god of love anon Beateth his wings--and, farewell! he is gone. Love is a thing as any spirit free. Women desire, by nature, liberty, And not to be constrained as a thrall, And so do men, if I the truth say shall. Look, who that is most patient in love, He is at his advantage all above. A virtue high is patience, certain, Because it vanquisheth, as clerks explain, Things to which rigour never could attain. For every word men should not chide and plain; Learn ye to suffer, or else, so may I go, Ye shall it learn, whether ye will or no. For in this world certain no wight there is Who neither doth nor saith some time amiss. Sickness or ire, or constellation, Wine, woe, or changing of complexion, Causeth full oft to do amiss or speak. For every wrong men may not vengeance wreak: After a time there must be temperance With every wight that knows self-governance. It was by virtue of his power of observing and drawing character, above all, that Chaucer became the true predecessor of two several growths in our literature, in both of which characterisation forms a most important element,--it might perhaps be truly said, the element which surpasses all others in importance. From this point of view the dramatic poets of the Elizabethan age remain unequalled by any other school or group of dramatists, and the English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the representatives of any other development of prose-fiction. In the art of construction, in the invention and the arrangement of incident, these dramatists and novelists may have been left behind by others; in the creation of character they are on the whole without rivals in their respective branches of literature. To the earlier at least of these growths Chaucer may be said to have pointed the way. His personages, more especially of course, as has been seen, those who are assembled together in the "Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales," are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real human beings, and types true to the likeness of whole classes of men and women, or to the mould in which all human nature is cast. This is upon the whole the most wonderful, as it is perhaps the most generally recognised of Chaucer's gifts. It would not of itself have sufficed to make him a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a literary form into which to pour the inspirations of his genius, as it afterwards stood ready for our great Elizabethans. But to it were added in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation, and that power of finding the right words for it, which have determined the success of many plays, and the absence of which materially detracts